HPC-Europa2

Objective

HPC-Europa2 is a partnership of 7 leading High Performance Computing (HPC) centres and 4 centres of excellence, carrying out research on advanced tools and methods for HPC. The aim of HPC-Europa2 is to provide advanced computational services in an inegrated way to European researchers working at the forefront of science.

HPC-Europa2 offers access to first-class HPC platforms for researchers throughout the whole of Europe in all domains of computational science, providing advanced computational environments, technical support and training. The ultimate goal is to allow researchers to achieve and maintain a competitive edge on the world stage.

HPC-Europa2 Transnational Access offers short collaborative research visits and access to some of Europe's best supercomputers. More information about HPC-Europa Transnational Access at HLRS ist available online.

HPC-Europa2Networking Activities promote co-operation and co-ordination between the participating infrastructures.

HPC-Europa2Joint Research Activities address technological issues that will improve the overall performance of these research infrastructures.

NA1: Coordination of the TA activity

NA1, co-ordinating the TA activities at consortium level, will homogenise and integrate the activity between the partners, and the dissemination. NA1 will assure the vision of the project as a whole and the homogenization, and at last to foster the culture of co-operation between the different partners. The coordination of NA1 is in charge to UEDIN-EPCC. This partner did the coordination of the TA access during the past project, so thanks to the deep experience in this field it is the more appropriate partner to assure the enhancing of these goals.

NA2: Facilitating the HPC Ecosystem

NA2 is in charge of all the gluing aspects external to the project, facilitating and cooperating in the establishment of a solid and effective HPC Ecosystem at European level. NA2 will assure the eradication and the visibility of the HPC-Europa brand to the scientific community around Europe and at world level. Moreover, NA2 will enlarge the user community involving a larger number of countries and research fields and groups. This aspect is not a matter of dissemination but involves a sustained effort to enlarge the user base, extending to new research disciplines and involving a larger number of countries in the access service. NA2 will reach their goals strictly cooperating with external projects and agencies to integrate and extend the HPC-Europa2 activity and methodologies to the HPC-Ecosystem.NA2 will increment the presence of HPC-Europa2 in all european countries. For this, we have created the PoP, Point of Presence, were every country has a responsible partner for identification of new contacts, and the establishment of cooperation.NA2 will provide experience and support for the evaluation process in the HPC area. For this purpose, special cooperation will be established with PRACE, for the future Tier-0 HPC systems, and with DEISA, for the current Tier-1 services. Progress update.

NA3: Training, Consultancy and Communication of the HPC Culture

NA3 will integrate and enhance the support to the users accessing to the HPC Facility. NA3 will operate for the benefit of the visitors, on the one hand improving the support, consultancy and training activities dedicated to HPC-Europa users and, on the other, improving the support of collaborative meeting tools based on existing infrastructures.NA3 will facilitate the effective usage and exploitation of massive parallel architectures, ensuring the diffusion of the related know-how and competencies, sharing them between experts and introducing them to newcomers and beginners in the field.

JRA1: HPC on Massively Parallel Architectures: Programming models

In the next few years, the main European HPC centers, most of whom are involved in HPC-Europa2 will provide HPC infrastructures in the order of several hundreds TeraFlop/s and even PetaFlop/s. For the optimal exploitation of such powerful systems, scientific applications need to be properly adapted. This, in general, can require the adoption of new programming models and new programming strategies and consequently code (re)writing or even reengineering. The JRA1 will afford these aspects, of paramount importance for the scientists involved in computational sciences, exploring, experiencing, testing and analyzing innovative solutions for parallel computing on massive parallel architectures, starting from the analysis of the state of the art and from the best practise already structured and achieved by external and expert relevant groups to be involved and kept aware of the outputs of the activity.

JRA2: Virtual Cluster

The aim of JRA2 is to help the TA visitors with the development and parallelization of applications, as well with the actual deployment on the TA site’s machines, which offer quite heterogeneous architectures. In order to ease the deployment of the user’s application, it is important to provide the visitor an early experience on parallel machines and methodologies.This activity will develop a "HPC-Europa-style" Live CD, that will allow actual hands-on building of a “virtual cluster”. This will assist the users (even before their stay at the TA centres) to get experience and make usage of an ad-hoc cluster with all the tools developed at each HPC-Europa2 partner site and have the developed code integrateable onto the final HPC machine at the TA site. The need for such JRA, was identified from the experience gained with the previous HPC-Europa project where some visitors were quite inexperienced in accessing parallel computing environment and methodologies. Many of their codes were not suitable for the requirements of the specific environment at the TA centre (queuing systems, libraries, environment).

Moreover, this JRA provides an excellent opportunity to integrate in a specific environment the tools and educational material developed at each center and in the other JRAs and NAs. You can download the image. Progress update.

JRA3: Tools for Scientific Data Services

The results of numerical investigation produced by actual HPC systems are growing in size and complexity. For dealing efficiently with this amount of data, technical solutions are needed as was identified in a Network Activity of the previous HPC-Europa project. Starting from this indication, JRA3 activity will develop data-grid tools with flexible and powerful meta-data capabilities. In particular, it will develop innovative solutions for scientific data management, search and filtering, and develop tools for high-level data-analysis to investigate and describe complex data-relationships. These tools will improve the data accessibility, reusability and enable the exchange within international research communities. The results of this JRA will greatly improve the way the research communities efficiently operate on data. Progress update.